


we're not dead yet

by orphan_account



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-04-06 19:26:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14063877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Various Leon-centric and Leon/Ada oneshots. Reposted from Tumblr, written 2009-2012, so I make no promises about the quality.





	1. crows (leon/ada)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> obligatory 'but what if zombie apocolypse' au

When they meet again, it’s with guns drawn and corpses all around, which would almost be charmingly nostalgic if the mess was confined to the city this time. Or the state. Or even the country. It’s something he knew would happen eventually. Not consciously, or something he wanted or planned, but something he’d felt deep in his bones from the first time he’s looked around in Raccoon all those years ago. That this was how the world ended. If not today, or tomorrow, it would end by teeth on flesh someday. As luck had it, it had been while he was still alive.

The surprise in this whole scenario, of course, was her, standing alone and catlike on the hill ahead of him with a crossbow pointed at his chest. Slowly, he holsters his .45, raises an empty hand to indicate he isn’t a threat.

“Been a long time,” The gruff sound of disuse in his own voice is a surprise, despite the halfhearted joke.

She cuts straight to the chase, as always. “Leon. You’re part of a group?” And she’s already scanning the trees with practiced eyes, looking for potential foes. An ambush wouldn’t really be a surprise, with the low state of supplies among survivors.

“Not anymore,” he replies. As hoped, she relaxes, seemingly secure in the fact he wouldn’t lie to her.

Instead, she pauses, gazing at him and trying to put pieces together. He’s not the sort of man to abandon a group, no matter how incompetent, and he has enough charisma to keep infighting to a minimum. Which left a single option. “How long?”

“Which time?” he shoots back, quick as a whip.

A carrion-bird passes by overhead, cawing to its fellows. Both look up, then dismiss the threat.

“I figured out your way was easier. Eventually.” he amends, and she doesn’t ask any more questions.

They’re always the survivors, both of them, like a curse.

—

It’s never really a question that they’ll help each other, at least on a temporary basis. It’s what they do, what they’ve always done, offered what aid they could to each other before drifting out of orbit and away once more. So when he steps through the trees on barely-defined paths like he knows them well, she follows, taking care to avoid suspicious arrangements of stick and rope.

His snares are awful, it’s a miracle he catches anything at all with what looks like half-remembered Boy Scout knots, and she resolves to teach him better before she goes. When they get there, the heavily-battered cabin with a caved-in wall he calls home isn’t much better, but there’s only two dozen or so nicks on the doorframe.

She doesn’t know why he bothers with a calendar. Personally, she hates watching the marks build up, as if they’re moving on to some kind of future. It seems like mockery.

—

“I thought you’d have had some kind of plan for a situation like this,” he remarks. “A bunker, or something.”

“I did,” she replies. “And now I don’t.”

“Gangs?” he asks. She busies herself with digging through his supplies, investigating anything she might be willing to trade for. “They’ve got a right to be angry, with the way Washington holed up.”

“Well, they got their revenge,” she remarks casually, testing the balance of a machete. “The whole thing went up in smoke by the time they were done with it, doors closed and everything.”

It’s the first genuine expression she’s seen on his face since they’ve met, a raw mixture of shock and sorrow.

—

When she goes to leave, he hugs her. It’s abrupt, all-encompassing, and tightly against his body. It is also hands-down the single most uncomfortable few seconds she has experienced in her entire life, but something about it makes her reconsider anyway.

“Our chances of survival are higher this way,” she answers his raised eyebrow, when she manages to wander back to his cabin by dark. There’s an unspoken ‘for now’ in her tone.

He shrugs and starts setting out a bedroll for her, but she catches him smiling gently to himself when he thinks she isn’t looking.

—

He learns not to take it personally when Ada avoids him for the bulk of the day. She’s not used to being around people that aren’t trying to kill her. Admittedly, neither is he these days, but the two of them seem to have taken the lack of company somewhat differently. Eventually, they meet in the middle, managing separate duties while the sun is up and making awkward, stumbling conversation by night. It turns out that she isn’t inclined to share and there’s not much he can share that wasn’t in his professional file at some point.

(All of which, apparently, she’s read down to the last detail. He’s not sure what to make of that.)

—

They survive, it’s what they do, as if the thought of death has never occurred to them and there’s still something objectively to live for besides the animalistic dislike of pain and fear of the unknown. But even animals have habits and they learn each other’s, how she wakes with the sun and sits down to eat, as if she won’t ever rest if she doesn’t take those few minutes, how he sleeps far more poorly than would be expected, sometimes even slips out because the walls are too small and rest has ceased to be a possibility.

(He thinks he’s not waking her. He is.)

They still don’t have the greatest conversations. It’s something to work on, as soon as they get past the elephants of “so what is our relationship now, exactly” and “how stupid am I, holding onto these tangled-up feelings for you for twenty years or more”. But Leon starts making jokes again, lame and unfunny and occasionally awkward, as if he’s just now remembered he possessed a sense of humor once upon a time, albeit a terrible one. And it’s not so much that he’s healing as he’s getting used to the presence of someone to tell jokes to.

Ada, by contrast, remembers how to roll her eyes, and they form an easy banter. Might as well find something to laugh at, if this is how things end.


	2. law and order (leon)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the fact that leon canonically names his guns things like 'matilda' and 'silver ghost' is fucking hilarious when casually referenced in internal monologue

It takes Leon awhile to stop reacting to every single noise he hears at night with first all the fear of someone who’s been through an awful ordeal, then next all the wild calculating of someone who knows how to survive, and finally the icy detachment of a trained killer. In fact, he never really stops at all, just moves into a quieter apartment complex, runs himself down and sleeps less on purpose, and starts to rely on the gun at his bedside for reassurance rather than paranoia.

So naturally, when a thing does go bump in the night and sounds like it’s in the next room, he’s almost unsure it’s real. Mostly for his own piece of mind, he takes Matilda in one hand, a knife in the other, and opens his bedroom doors, stepping silently down the hall.

It’s the sound again, definitely human, small adult sized? Leon’s already running plans through his head, raises his weapon and steps around the corner, tries to remember what the Stand Your Ground laws are in D.C.–

–and it’s a kid, a kid that can’t be older than seventeen, standing there holding his now-unplugged plasma TV, about halfway out the door. The kid doesn’t appear to see him, so he summons his best police voice and speaks softly, but clearly.

“Put it down. Gently.”

Of course, the kid panics, drops it on the floor with a noise that almost makes Leon groan out loud, then panics again when he presumably that sees the apartment resident he was planning on robbing looks irritated and deadly armed even in his pajamas.

“Please don’t kill me, it was only a joke, I ended up here on accident–” the boy babbles, and Leon holds up his knife hand. A moment later he realizes it’s actually forming the military signal for “stop”, but the message seems to have gotten through anyway.

It’s at that exact moment he realizes he has a choice between doing the right thing and just going back to sleep. He hates, a little bit, that there’s not even a question in what his answer is going to be, but maybe he can at least get something decent to come out of this situation.

“Look, just… don’t try to take off,” he manages, finally, letting the threat drop from his voice. “I promise I can outrun you. We’re going to take a drive up to the station, and then we’re going find your parents, and then all of us are going to sit down and talk about why you wanted to ruin my plans for an old Western marathon tomorrow night. Capiche?”

The kid nods, mutely, and Leon wonders if some part of him wouldn’t have made a decent police officer after all.


	3. silver ghost (leon)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> set post-degeneration. and look, i know this is emo, but have you read the ARMS article where leon talks to kendo after he gives him a new gun? because he is actually this emo.
> 
> also, this was written long before vendetta, so i'd like the biggest 'called that' on leon's character development ever. slow death of the idealist as he realizes his ideals will never come to pass, more at 11.

Two days. Two days is all they’re giving him, excluding the five-hour helicopter flight and three hours of report filing and paperwork. He wants to laugh.

Banging open the door to his D.C. apartment, Leon Kennedy crashes down on his couch and tries to remember when near-death experiences actually bothered him. Right now, all he can think of is that he’s alive, and that’s probably pretty damn good, but the fact remains that right now he feels more hollow than an empty oil drum.

Another day, another bioterroism incident. He likes to think he’s doing the right thing, becoming a government lapdog, obediently following all their rules and saving people when it’s in the nation’s best interest. Getting into this he thought he’d meet some really great people, congressmen and department heads who didn’t care about bureaucracy, just about getting things done and doing the right thing for the people. What remained of the Raccoon City Police Department should have been his first clue. To most people, human lives are something to add and subtract with dollars and cents at the end of the day, and it’s naïve to think the government would be any different. The paper trails are missing from the archives and everything looks innocent enough, but he can guess well enough that Umbrella had their claws pretty deep in the Capitol Building. He’s no fool, and there was a reason why the previous president made the Anti-Umbrella Organization an underground one. Leon never wanted a part in this political bullshit, he just wanted to stop people from getting hurt. Now, working presidential protection on the weeks where offshore science labs haven’t cooked up any new nightmares, he’s become acutely aware that everyone within a five mile radius of the capital has some serious dirty laundry and lies to go with it. Secret Service is practically invisible in that regard.

Claire had gotten mad at him that he knew about the T-virus vaccine in development and hadn’t mentioned it. He wasn’t sure she really got it, that half of the information he dealt with daily could result disastrous consequences if it got out. Even if the project hadn’t been a secret, he’d long since learned to partition all the things he learned at work into a part of himself that never, ever had access to his mouth. Occupational hazard.

That was probably why he didn’t have a girlfriend, actually. As many girls as people thought you got as an agent, there seemed to be some kind of widespread notion that you could go around and brag about what you did for a living. Since he couldn’t do that, there were pretty much two things left to talk about: himself and the weather. Seeing as the weather got old fast and talking about himself was something that made him acutely uncomfortable, he never ended up being too much of a conversationalist. Just as well, he guessed, he didn’t have all that much time, anyway.

It’s just about now that he notices he’s been sitting on his pale blue couch with his clothes covered in dirt, slime, and various bodily fluids. Yeah, he was going to have to clean that, but he should probably shower off first before he tracked the stuff anywhere else. It’d probably help clear his head, too, because by the looks of things, he’d been sitting on his couch staring at the wall. Probably just over-tired, nothing new.

The careful way he set down his weapons and their holsters on the sink is in stark contrast to the careless way the cargo pants hit the floor. The curious feeling that outbreaks brought on still lingers, as if he wasn’t really in control of his body, just watching. Starting the water and stepping in, he realizes he doesn’t stink nearly as much as he usually tended to after one of these things. Maybe because he’d been spared the trek through the sewers that generally came along free of charge. Or maybe it was the alcohol spray. Who knew.

Actually, it was downright depressing how used to this kind of thing he was. Sights that made most people instantaneously lose the contents of their stomachs were just par for the course now. He wondered vaguely if something was wrong in his head by now for that. Probably. The fact that he’d just almost died a half a dozen times, fought monsters straight out of science fiction and didn’t feel a goddamn thing was likely proof of that. A few hours of government-required counseling doesn’t really do much when you can easily identify a crimson and grey puddle with pale white chunks as the remains of somebody’s brains, eyes, and skull.

Thing is, he remembered being tense as a wire after Raccoon, so much so that the FBI just handed him a hotel room key and told him to come back in a few days when he had his head on straight. He remembers the mindless joy of being alive but also the exhaustion of having lost an irreplaceable part of himself. What changed? When did he become this ghost, trapped between the two worlds, anyway? Talking to Kendo, he’d been a little startled when something that profound had flown out of his mouth to name the new gun, but it had been true nonetheless.

Walking as a spirt neither alive nor dead… it had a dramatic ring to it, but that wasn’t quite how he’d meant it. It’d just seemed the best way to express things at the time. Death was nothing if not a virus in itself, claiming lives and yet irreversibly altering those it spare by narrow margins. Floating as a spectre was the only way to try and explain to someone else how it felt to stroll down a city street, watching people laughing and chattering. Have them glance and wave at him as if he was just another of them, a perfectly ordinary human being with a boring day job, a wife and two kids. They couldn’t tell, probably couldn’t even understand exactly how different he felt from them. Some invisible line separated them, drawn at the ability to laugh and joke and live in a carefree way. The part of him that automatically softened his footfalls and analyzed potential threats with the efficiency of a cold machine.

What was it that he’d lost now? His mind, his soul, his humanity? No, he was pretty sure he wasn’t crazy, souls were just an abstract concept, and humanity wasn’t so much something that could be lost so easily. Whatever it was, that nameless part that turned him from a human to a ghost, it was a sacrifice he was willing to make. Someone had to make it, after all, if bioweapons were going to be kept under control.

The water has become ice cold, harsh on his sore muscles, and so he drags himself out of the shower, flipping the tap off and throwing on a pair of baggy sweats.

He’d always been the public service type, if he thought about it. Ready and willing to lie down his life saving people in a fire, or diffusing a bomb as a police offer. Still, this hadn’t exactly been what he’d had in mind when he signed up for the Academy. He’d been noble, yeah, but looking back? He’s not sure he would have chosen this life if he’d had a choice. Hell, he’s not sure he would even be working for the government right now if they hadn’t threatened him with Sherry, and a part of him is still bitter for having what seemed to be no choice whatsoever. Because even now, letting a little girl die just wasn’t an option.

They say sleep was like death in many ways. He’d always called bullshit on that, personally, since you could wake up from one and not the other. And yet as he’s drifting off, drifting off or passing out from exhaustion, he’s never sure which, the similarities strike him as ironic. If the world of waking and living was no longer his, what did that make the world of death and nightmares? Half-conscious and bleary, there seemed to be some kind of dualistic irony to the whole thing, living in an oblivious world by day and a bloody one at night. And yet, neither one was his and neither would claim him.


	4. that's kinky (leon/ada)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> secret agents flirting ft. formatting that looked infinitely better on tumblr

“All right, I’ll bite. What in the world was that for?” Ada looked down at her left arm, snugly handcuffed to Leon’s right. The irony of the situation did not escape her, her being a spy and him being an ex-cop turned agent.

“You’re a key witness in this case, I can’t have you getting away,” Leon stated, matter-of-fact. For all his calm in the center of the storm attitude, he seemed almost pleased with himself.

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “And so you handcuffed me to yourself? My, are you usually this forward or is it just me?”

“In the past you’ve been pretty adept at avoiding me. I felt extreme measure were justified.” He shrugged, then began to reload one of his VP70s, keeping an eye on their surroundings.

“Maybe you’ve just never been fast enough to catch me,” Ada shifted her weight, weighing the options of her current situation. It might be easier to play along for now and catch Leon with his guard down later.

He only smirked. “Be easier if you didn’t have a head start.”

“Are you saying you need me to give you one?” She let out an exaggerated sigh. “And here I thought we were past that.”

“A fair chance is all I’m asking.” The first of his dual pistols loaded, he set to work on the other.

Ada scoffed. “Life isn’t fair.”

“So all’s fair in love and war, is that it?” The wording of the question was rhetorical, but he sounded genuinely curious.

“Says the man who handcuffed an informant to himself. I’d like to see that in your agent rulebook.”

He grinned, holstering his weapon. “Touche.”


	5. we're not dead yet (leon/ada)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> leon being open/honest and throwing ada off-guard will be the death of me, i swear

“Well, I’m not dead,” he quips into the phone as he coughs up blood, then rubs it off carefully before it gets gummed up inside the mouthpiece. He seems like he wants to add something else, something witty and offhanded but doesn’t, can’t scrape together the energy.

The other end of the line pauses, carefully composes itself and enunciates a little too clearly. “What now?”

“We’ve done everything we can. You double-checked for survivors on your end and set the self-destruct, right?”

“I am a professional, Leon,” she reminds him without heat. He chuckles, but stops when she lets out an abrupt gasp of pain. Unwilling, she’d never let anyone else know she was hurting, unless–

“…you too, huh?” And in a moment, the tough professionalism drains out of his voice, leaving it bare. There’s sorrow, pain. Some measure of fear, softened concern.

“There were too many,” comes the murmured response, at length.

“We’ve gotten slow in our old age.”

“Maybe you did.” She’s trying to play back, stay cool against the vulnerability in his voice. It’s not working.

He suppresses a hiss as blood leaks through the clenched fingers in his side. “Ada? Wait.”

“Hmm?”

“…don’t hang up.”

She says nothing for a long time, so long he starts to fear she’s no longer there.

“Okay,” she whispers finally, and he tries to focus only on the sound of her breathing.


End file.
